The dramatic recent increase of the smart Internet of Everything (IoE) in Industry 4.0 has significantly increased energy consumption, carbon emissions, and global warming. IoE applications in Industry 4.0 face many challenges, including energy efficiency, heterogeneity, security, interoperability, and centralization. Therefore, Industry 4.0 in Beyond the Sixth-Generation (6G) networks demands moving to sustainable, green IoE and identifying efficient and emerging technologies to overcome sustainability challenges. Many advanced technologies and strategies efficiently solve issues by enhancing connectivity, interoperability, security, decentralization, and reliability. Greening IoE is a promising approach that focuses on improving energy efficiency, providing a high Quality of Service (QoS), and reducing carbon emissions to enhance the quality of life at a low cost. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of how advanced technologies can contribute to green IoE in the 6G network of Industry 4.0 applications. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of advanced technologies, including Blockchain, Digital Twins (DTs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, a.k.a. drones), and Machine Learning (ML), to improve connectivity, QoS, and energy efficiency for green IoE in 6G networks. We evaluate the capability of each technology in greening IoE in Industry 4.0 applications and analyse the challenges and opportunities to make IoE greener using the discussed technologies.

Machine learning (ML) techniques have demonstrated considerable effectiveness when integrated into routing protocols to enhance the performance of Smart Grid Networks. However, their performance across diverse real-world scenarios remains a topic of exploration. In this study, we evaluate the performance and transferability of four ML models—Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Feedforward Neural Network (FF), Decision Trees, and Naive Bayes—across three distinct scenarios: Barcelona, Montreal, and Rome. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis, we analyze the varying efficacy of these models in different scenarios. Our results demonstrate that LSTM outperforms other models in the Montreal and Rome scenarios, highlighting its effectiveness in predicting the optimal forwarding node for packet transmission. In contrast, Ensemble of Bagged Decision Trees emerge as the optimal model for the Barcelona scenario, exhibiting strong performance in selecting the most suitable forwarding node for packet transmission. However, the transferability of these models to scenarios where they were not trained is notably limited, as evidenced by their decreased performance on datasets from other scenarios. This observation underscores the importance of considering the data characteristics when selecting ML models for real-world applications. Furthermore, we identify that the distribution of nodes within datasets significantly influences model performance, highlighting its critical role in determining model efficacy. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenges inherent in transferring ML models between real-world scenarios, providing valuable guidance for practitioners and researchers alike in optimizing ML applications in Smart Grid Networks.

The operations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are susceptible to cybersecurity risks, mainly because of their firm reliance on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and radio frequency (RF) sensors. GPS and RF sensors are vulnerable to potential threats, such as spoofing attacks that can cause the UAVs to behave erratically. Since these threats are widespread and potent, it is imperative to develop effective intrusion detection systems. In this paper, we propose an image-based intrusion detection system for detecting GPS spoofing cyberattacks based on a deep learning methodology. We combine convolutional neural networks with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset features, data augmentation to increase the size and diversity of the training dataset, and transfer learning to improve the proposed model’s performance with limited data to design a fast, accurate, and general method. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution carried out using benchmark datasets. We achieved an accuracy of 100% within a running time of 120.64 s at 0.3529 ms latency and a detection time of 2.035 s in the case of the training dataset. Further, using this trained model, we achieved an accuracy of 99.25% within a detection time of 2.721 s on an unseen dataset that was unrelated to the one used for training the model. In contrast, other models, such as Inception-v3, showed lower accuracy on unseen datasets. However, Inception-v3 performance improved significantly after Bayesian optimization, with the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator reaching 99.06% accuracy. Our results demonstrate that the proposed image-based intrusion detection method outperforms the existing solutions while providing a general model for detecting cyberattacks included in unseen datasets.